Our Town

Thornton Wilder

Analysis of Major Characters

Act I: Part one

Themes

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas
explored in a literary work.

The Transience of Human Life

Although Wilder explores the stability of human traditions
and the reassuring steadfastness of the natural environment, the
individual human lives in Our Town are transient,
influenced greatly by the rapid passage of time. The Stage Manager
often notes that time seems to pass quickly for the people in the
play. At one point, having not looked at his watch for a while,
the Stage Manager misjudges the time, which demonstrates that sometimes
even the timekeeper himself falls victim to the passage of time.

In light of the fact that humans are powerless to stem
the advance of time, Wilder ponders whether human beings truly appreciate
the precious nature of a transient life. Act I, which the Stage
Manager entitles “Daily Life,” testifies to the artfulness and value
of routine daily activity. Simple acts such as eating breakfast
and feeding chickens become subjects of dramatic scenes, indicating
the significance Wilder sees in such seemingly mundane events. Wilder
juxtaposes this flurry of everyday activity with the characters’ inattentiveness
to it. The characters are largely unaware of the details of their
lives and tend to accept their circumstances passively. The Gibbs
and Webb families rush through breakfast, and the children rush
off to school, without much attention to one another. They, like
most human beings, maintain the faulty assumption that they have
an indefinite amount of time on Earth. Mrs. Gibbs refrains from
insisting that her husband take her to Paris because she thinks
there will always be time to convince him later.

The dead souls in Act III emphasize this theme of transience,
disapproving of and chastising the living for their “ignorance”
and “blindness.” The dead even view George’s grief and prostration upon
Emily’s grave as a pitiable waste of human time. Instead of grieving
for the dead, they believe, the living should be enjoying the time
they still have on Earth.

The medium of theater perfectly suits Wilder’s intent
to make ordinary lives and actions seem extraordinary, as the perspective
of the dead souls parallels the audience’s perspective. Just as
the dead souls’ distance finally enables them to appreciate the
daily events in Grover’s Corners, so too does the audience’s outsider
perspective render daily events valuable. We have never before witnessed
a Gibbs family breakfast, and when the scene is dramatized on the stage,
we see it as significant. Indeed, every action on the stage becomes
significant, from Howie Newsome’s milk delivery to the town choir
practice.

The Importance of Companionship

Because birth and death seem inevitable, the most important
stage of life is the middle one: the quest for companionship, friendship, and
love. Humans have some degree of control over this aspect of life.
Though they may not be fully aware of their doing so, the residents
of Grover’s Corners constantly take time out of their days to connect
with each other, whether through idle chat with the milkman or small
talk with a neighbor. The most prominent interpersonal relationship
in the play is a romance—the courtship and marriage of George and
Emily—and Wilder suggests that love epitomizes human creativity
and achievement in the face of the inevitable advance of time.

Though romance is prominent in Our Town,
it is merely the most vivid among a wide range of bonds that human
beings are capable of forging. Wilder depicts a number of different
types of relationships, and though some are merely platonic, all
are significant. From the beginning of Act I, the Stage Manager
seeks to establish a relationship with the audience, which forges
a tie between the people onstage and the audience offstage. Within
the action of the play, we witness the milkman and the paperboy
chatting with members of the Gibbs and Webb families as they deliver
their goods. The children walk to and from school in groups or pairs.
Mrs. Gibbs and Mrs. Webb, next-door neighbors, meet in their yards
to talk. We glimpse Mr. and Mrs. Webb and Dr. and Mrs. Gibbs in
private conversation. As Mrs. Gibbs articulates, “Tain’t natural
to be lonesome.”

Even the play’s title—using the collective pronoun “[o]ur”—underscores
the human desire for community. Many aspects of the play attest
to the importance of community and companionship: the welcoming
introduction from the Stage Manager; the audience participation,
through the placement among the audience of actors within the audience
who interact with those onstage; and the presence of numerous groups
in the play, such as the choir, the wedding party, the funeral party,
and the group of dead souls.

The Artificiality of the Theater

Wilder does not pretend that his play represents a slice
of real life. The events that occur onstage could easily be moments
in real lives—a milkman delivers milk, a family has a hurried weekday breakfast,
two young people fall in love—but Wilder undermines this appearance
of reality by filling the play with devices that emphasize the artificiality
of theater. The Stage Manager is the most obvious of these devices,
functioning as a sort of narrator or modernized Greek chorus who
comments on the play’s action while simultaneously involving himself
in it. The Stage Manager speaks directly to the audience and acknowledges
our lack of familiarity with Grover’s Corners and its inhabitants.
He also manipulates the passage of time, incorporating flashbacks
that take us—and the characters—back in time to relive certain significant
moments. These intentional disruptions of the play’s chronology
prevent us from believing that what we see onstage could be real.
Rather, the life we see on the stage becomes merely representative
of real life, and is thus a fair target for Wilder’s metaphorical
and symbolic manipulation. Wilder’s parallel positioning of the
realm of the play and the real world implies a separation between
the two. However, rather than distance the audience from the events
on the stage, Wilder acknowledges the artificial nature of the stage
and thus bridges the gap between the audience and the onstage events.
This closeness between the audience and the story forces the audience
to identify more fully with the characters and events.

Motifs

Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary
devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.

The Stages of Life

The division of the play’s narrative action into three
acts reflects Wilder’s division of human life into three parts:
birth, love and marriage, and death. The play opens at the dawn
of a new day with a literal birth: at the very beginning of Act
I, we learn that Dr. Gibbs has just delivered twins. Act II details
George and Emily’s courtship and marriage. Act III features a funeral
and delves into the possibilities of an afterlife. The overall arc
of the story carries the audience from the beginning of life to
its end. Our observation of the lives of the Gibbs and Webb families,
condensed into a few short hours, leads us to realize that the human
experience, while multifaceted, is nevertheless brief and precious.
Indeed, Wilder demonstrates how quickly the characters proceed from
stage to stage. George and Emily marry in Act II, but they appear
just as nervous and childish as they do in Act I. The second stage
of life has snuck up on them. This intermingling of the stages of
life recurs later, when the second stage of Emily’s life, her marriage,
is suddenly cut short when she dies in childbirth.

Natural Cycles

While Our Town spans the course of many
years, from 1899 through 1913, it also collapses its events into
the span of one day. It opens with a morning scene and ends with
a nighttime scene: Act I begins just before dawn, and Act III ends
at 11 P.M. The play also metaphorically spans
the course of a human life, tracing the path from birth in Dr. Gibbs’s
delivery of twins in the opening scene, to death in Emily’s funeral
in the final scene. The span of a life parallels the span of the
day: birth is related to dawn, and death is related to night. Wilder’s
attention to natural cycles highlights his themes of the transience
of life and the power of time. While a single human life comprises
only one finite revolution from birth to death, the world continues
to spin, mothers continue to give birth, and human beings continue
to exist as just one part of the universe.

Morning

Morning scenes are prominent in each of the play’s three
acts: Act I depicts the ordinary morning activities of the townspeople,
Act II portrays the Gibbs and Webb families on the morning of Emily
and George’s wedding, and Act III includes Emily’s return to the
morning of her twelfth birthday. Despite differences in context
and circumstance, each morning scene appears strikingly similar
to the others, which emphasizes the lack of change in Grover’s Corners.
In each of the three scenes, Howie Newsome delivers milk and a Crowell
boy delivers newspapers. Yet while stability is clearly a feature
of life in the town, Wilder shows that it often leads to indifference. Because
each day appears more or less the same as the previous one, the
townspeople fail to observe or appreciate the subtle, life-affirming
peculiarities each day brings.

Wilder treats each of the three mornings differently,
which highlights the subtle differences between them. He presents
the first morning as merely an average day, but as foreign observers,
we appreciate the novelty of the experience. On the morning of the wedding,
Wilder shows how impending events disturb the morning rituals and
create a unique experience. Lastly, Wilder presents the morning
of Emily’s twelfth birthday through the eyes of her dead soul, a
perspective that gives the morning a truly extraordinary and beautiful
transience. Wilder implies that though mundane routines and events
may generally be repetitive, the details are what make life interesting
and deserve attention.

The Manipulation of Time

Events do not progress chronologically in Our
Town. The Stage Manager has the ability to cue scenes whenever
he wishes, and can call up previous moments in the lives of the
characters at will. The most prominent of these manipulations of
time are the flashbacks to Mr. Morgan’s soda fountain and to Emily’s
twelfth birthday. Wilder explicitly shuffles the flow of time within
the play to engage, please, and inform his audience in three ways.
First, Wilder uses the lack of chronological order to engage his
audience by overturning their expectations of the theater. As opposed
to showing us the progression of a day, or of a life, Wilder shows
us disparate moments, reordering them in a way that best reflects
his—and the Stage Manager’s—philosophical themes. Second, the Stage
Manager’s informal treatment of the flow of time adds to the play’s
pleasing conversational tone. The Stage Manager’s desire to flash
back to George and Emily’s first date at the drugstore makes him
seem just as curious about the origins of the couple’s relationship
as we are. Third, by including flashbacks within a linear narrative,
Wilder reminds the audience how swiftly time passes. The characters
spend precious time flashing back in their own minds, appreciating
past moments in retrospect rather than recognizing the value of moments
as they occur in the present.

Symbols

Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors
used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.

The Time Capsule

In Act I, the Stage Manager briefly mentions a time capsule
that is being buried in the foundation of a new building in town.
The citizens of Grover’s Corners wish to include the works of Shakespeare, the
Constitution, and the Bible; the Stage Manager says he would like
to throw a copy of Our Town into the time capsule
as well. The time capsule embodies the human desire to keep a record
of the past. Accordingly, it also symbolizes the idea that certain
parts of the past deserve to be remembered over and above others.
Wilder wishes to challenge this latter notion. He has the Stage
Manager place Our Town into the capsule so the
people opening it in the future will not only appreciate the daily
lives of the townspeople from the past, but also their own daily
lives in the future.

The self-referential notion of placing the play into
the time capsule also carries symbolic weight. The fact that Our
Town is actually mentioned within Our Town clearly
shows Wilder’s intent to break down the wall that divides the world
of the play from the world of the audience. By mentioning his own
play within his play, Wilder acknowledges that his text is artificial,
a literary creation. Even more important, however, the Stage Manager’s
wish to put the play into the capsule lends historic significance
to the audience’s watching of Our Town. He implies
that even the current production of the play—its sets, lights, actors,
and audience—is in itself an important detail of life.

Howie Newsome and the Crowell Boys

Each of the three morning scenes in Our Town features
the milkman, Howie Newsome, and a paperboy—either Joe or Si Crowell. Throughout
the play, the Stage Manager and other characters, such as Mr. Webb
in his report in Act I, discuss the stability of Grover’s Corners—nothing
changes much in the town. Howie and the Crowell boys illustrate
this constancy of small town life. They appear in 1901,
just as they do in 1904 and in the flashback
to 1899. Because Grover’s Corners is Wilder’s
microcosm of human life in general, Howie and the Crowells represent
not only the stability of life in Grover’s Corners, but the stability
of human life in general. The milkman and the paperboys embody the
persistence of human life and the continuity of the human experience
from year to year, from generation to generation. Moreover, the
fact that Si replaces his brother Joe shows that the transience
of individual lives actually becomes a stabilizing force. Growing
from birth toward death, humans show how the finite changes in individual
lives are simply part of stable cycles.

The Hymn “Blessed Be the Tie That Binds”

A choir sings the hymn “Blessed Be the Tie That Binds”
in the background three different times throughout the play. In
part, the repetition of the song emphasizes Wilder’s general notion
of stability and tradition. However, the Christian hymn primarily
embodies Wilder’s belief that the love between human beings is divine
in nature. The “tie” in the song’s lyrics refers to both the tie
between humans and God and the ties among humans themselves.

The three scenes that include the hymn also prominently
feature Emily and George, highlighting the “tie that binds” the
two of them. The first instance of the song comes during a choir
practice, which occurs simultaneously with George and Emily’s conversation through
their open windows in Act I. The second instance comes during the
wedding ceremony in Act II. The third instance comes during Emily’s
funeral, as her body is interred and she joins the dead in the cemetery,
leaving George behind. By associating this particular song with
the play’s critical moments, Wilder foregrounds the notion of companionship
as an essential, even divine, feature of human life. The hymn may
add some degree of Christian symbolism to the play, but Wilder,
for the most part, downplays any discussion of specifically Christian
symbols. He concentrates on the hymn not because of its allusion
to the fellowship between Christians in particular, but rather because
of what it says about human beings in general.